Freestyle Blind Tasting Competition – The Result

by Oliver Klimek on October 11, 2012

After the first blind tasting round with only Scotch single malt whiskies, most competitors also signed up for the ‘Freestyle’ tasting. In addition to that, a few new tasters joined the team. Again not all of them managed to submit their guesses, but 15 of them did.

Any world whisky could be included. Points were awarded like this:

Naming the expression correctly: 30 points

Otherwise:

Country: 2 points (Scotland is treated as a single country, Ireland includes Northen Irleand, Rest of UK is treated as a single country). Guessing a country that is wrong but nearby: 1 point.

Distillery or brand: 5 points

Age: 5 points minus 0.5 points per year of difference but not into negative territory. Correctly identifying a non-age-statement whisky as such gives 5 points as well. If only years of bottling and distillation are given on the bottle, age is assumed to be the difference regardless of legal age.

The maximum of points achievable was 150 when you managed to guess all five expressions correctly. Here are the three most successful competitors:

Miguel Angel Blanch Lardin (Spain) – 46.50

Peter Lading (Denmark) – 45,45

Stefan Kah (Germany/Scotland) – 41.88

Much to my surprise, three competitors managed to guess a whisky correctly since there were no exact hits in the Scotch tasting. One bottle even was correctly identified by two people. Actually the very first guess from the very fist submission I received was a full hit!

The bottles are listed here acording to their ranking among the tasters who also submitted their personal ranking. Not all tasters guessed actual expressions but at least countries and age or ABV.

“Wicked after taste, not pleasant at all. Could barely drink it and water did not help”

Summary

During the tasting period I read some remarks of competitors who used words like “sadist” or “torture”. Well, I have to admit that this was never meant to be a best of world whiskies selection. I could well have picked a handful of highly rated world whiskies here, but I decided not to take the easy route. I chose whiskies I had never tried before, and I also did not look up any scores or tasting notes. The reason why I selceted a bottle is named in the according section.

The goal was to have a completely unbiased selection on both sides of the ‘game’. And it turned out that Scotch still is a benchmark for whisky quality. The Scotch in this selection earned an undisputed first place, and because of its unusual wine cask finish this was not even a bottle that you could call a reference.

Yes, there are a lot of high quality world whiskies around, especially from distilleries who try to learn from the Scottish instead of reinventing the wheel whisky-wise. Luckily not many whiskies are really bad. But there are quite a lot of whiskies out there which are more interesting for their novelty value than to be a real challenge for the traditional whisky producing countries. Obviously a set of five drams is not enough for proper statistics but they are quite in line with my own tasting experiences of international whiskies.

OMG – what utter fun. Huge kudos to all 3 who got Hammerhead right. I was so close to guessing Pendleton for yellow – but chose the only other Canadian whisky bottled in Oregon! That will haunt me – but as usual – the lesson is that tasting blind is very hard. The lessons learned are humble ones – but the experience gained is invaluable. Add that to the fact that we just tasted some extremely interesting and obscure drams that most of us would never get to try any other way and it adds up to a fabulous clinic on the wide latitudes of the flavor gamut of malt whisky. That being said, the Scotch tasting was more delicious over all – and by a pretty wide margin. My aggregate score of the Scotch Blind was between 4 and 5 stars for the whole flight – and between 3 and 4 for the Freestyle. The Highland Park was a definite 5 star and the only one I would seek out again. Hammerhead is way better than expected with a huge floral effusive nose – but a shy palate and short finish. Pendleton is a decent base expression of a blended Canadian rye – but nothing standout. The Eddu & Isawa are richly flavored misses. The Isawa, in particular, has sulfury off notes – but some very unique flavors otherwise.

Just to prevent misunderstandings, I did not name the correct hits in the article, but two people correctly guessed the Eddu Silver and one the Hammerhead. Not suprisingly these three tasters are the winners.

A great experience and obviously chuffed by the result. A shame I didn’t take part in the Scotch one, but maybe there’ll be more opportunities. Still, without recognising the very distinctive Eddu, which I tried last year, things would have looked very poor… So there’s still lots to learn. Thanks very much for organising!

I guessed the Hammerhead. You are really evil Oliver :), using a whisky that only exists a single batch of it
I love the taste of Hammerhead, it is really curious one and well, I thought of it when tasting because it was really evil option and knowing what I know of the previous tasting…

Very fun experience. I enjoyed more the whiskies of the previous tasting though.